Un-asked-for-language support

Michal Jaegermann michal at harddata.com
Mon Nov 30 01:59:55 UTC 2009


On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 08:06:47PM -0500, Richard Ryniker wrote:
> 
> In either case (packages contain data for many locales; packages do not
> contain locale data, but have a shared dependency on other packages to
> provide data for each individual locale), it is possible to consider a
> pruning utility that would delete unnecessary data

A "pruning utility" does exits.  If you have various language
packages, like "openoffice.org-langpack..." or "kde-l10n-..." then
it is called "Customize now" during an installation and later on
"yum remove ...".  You can also use 'kickstart' if you do multiple
installations.

If you are worried about an excess of locale data in individual
packages then create /etc/rpm/macros.lang with a content like

%_install_langs  C:en:fr

or whatever you deem reasonable in your case and see what will
happen.  There are the following problems with that:
 - AFAIK this is not documented or advertised in any way
 - it has no effect on packages already installed
 - it breaks yum-presto in a manifest way
 - savings may turn to be below your expectations
 - somebody else using your machine now or in the future may find
   out that a support for her/his desired locale is broken without
   obvious ways to fix it (all affected packages would have to
   reinstalled with new, possibly default, '%_install_langs'
   although '--force' option to rpm will help with that).

Try 'rpm --showrc | grep langs' to see how you have it set now.
To see what happened to files in an installed package use
'rpm -qs <some_package>'.

     Michal




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